Stringent Malaysian law on foreign workers likely

Malaysia is drafting a stringent law on foreign workers to control their hiring and salaries in an effort to calm labour unrest and reduce the country's dependency on immigrant workers.
Malaysia's Deputy Home Affairs Minister Datuk Tan Chai Ho said the move was aimed at tightening hiring procedures and enabling authorities to check on the employers and foreign workers, reported The Star, a Malaysian daily, yesterday.
“The government views with great concern the huge number of foreign workers in the country. It has become a serious problem as all kinds of social and security problems are cropping up,” he said.
The proposed law will allow the government to monitor the workers and control their behaviour more effectively so that they won't create problems for the country or society, Tan Chai Ho said.
Such a move by Malaysia came following numerous complaints of low pay rates for foreign workers, especially to Bangladeshi immigrants. There have also been complains of harsh treatment including workers being confined in their rooms, poorly feed and in some cases not being provided with the jobs they had been promised.
A group of 80 Bangladeshi workers returned from Malaysia recently after suffering exploitation and unemployment, while 800 of other workers protested the low pay given by their employers in the Malaysian state of Johor.
There are currently around 3 lakh Bangladeshi workers in Malaysia. However on October 3, the country imposed a freeze on issuing new work visas as a result of recent unrest.
A migrant rights organization working in the South East Asian country also found flaws in the policies of hiring foreign workers and found in its surveys involvement of a huge amount of illegal money in the process.
Last week, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi called on Malaysians to stop their dependency on foreign workers, saying that most of the foreign workers were unskilled and did not contribute to nation-building, The Star reported.
Speaking at an occasion, he described the hiring of foreign workers in large numbers as an “addiction” among Malaysian employers that must be stopped.
According to the Malaysia's Auditor-General's Report for 2006, there were 1.87 million foreign workers as of December last year. It is estimated that there are as many illegal foreign workers as legal ones in the country, bringing the total to more than three million.
Deputy Internal Security Minister Datuk Fu Ah Kiow said it was high time to create a mechanism to hold employers accountable when their foreign employees changed jobs or were retrenched.
“Currently, they are everywhere and the large number of them in certain housing schemes are creating uneasiness among the locals,” he said.